A beginner’s guide to solving adtech infrastructure challenges

Modern adtech platforms run on real-time bidding (RTB), automated auctions, and user targeting at massive scale. Every impression triggers a chain reaction: in a matter of milliseconds, bid requests are sent, evaluated, priced, and returned.

To ensure optimum adtech performance, most teams focus on optimizing algorithms and targeting. But underneath all this is a hidden but fundamental layer that determines whether your platform is fast and efficient enough to compete.

That layer is infrastructure. It’s rarely noticed when it works but a significant source of friction when it doesn’t, resulting in latency spikes, stalled campaigns, and spiralling costs. To compete in modern programmatic advertising, you don’t need to be an infrastructure expert, but you do need to understand the foundations.

In this guide, we break down five of the most common adtech infrastructure challenges and introduce beginner-level principles to address them.

5 common adtech infrastructure challenges (and how to solve them)

1. Speed

Speed in adtech equates to how fast your system can receive a bid request, process it, make a decision, and respond. In most cases, you have less than 100 milliseconds before the opportunity disappears. If your infrastructure slows down, auctions time out. And when auctions time out, revenue drops.

Because programmatic advertising operates in real-time, you don’t get the luxury of second attempts. Every impression is a micro-transaction happening inside a strict time window. Speed directly affects win rate, fill rate, campaign performance, user experience, and revenue. Even small increases in latency can cause measurable revenue loss at scale.

To maintain speed and reduce latency in adtech, consider these infrastructure best practices:  

• Prioritize adtech infrastructure providers that offer deterministic performance

• Keep bidding and decisioning workloads separate from analytics and background jobs

• Deploy hardware close to traffic sources to decrease network latency

• Track p95 and p99 response times, not just averages

• Load test for peak conditions - your busiest day defines your real requirements

As a general principle, remember, if you can’t predict performance, you can’t protect revenue.

2. Cost

It’s not unusual for infrastructure costs in adtech to increase faster than revenue grows. Traffic spikes, inefficient configurations, unnecessary data movement, and overprovisioned systems create unpredictable bills, and already thin margins make this worse.

Most adtech business models operate on narrow spreads between buy and sell which means a small increase in infrastructure spend can eliminate margin entirely. Cost pressures increase when traffic bursts quickly, data retention expands, bandwidth and egress fees accumulate, and systems are built for peak load but sit idle most of the time. Inefficient and underutilized infrastructure quickly becomes a significant financial drain. 

Shared cloud environments with usage-based billing further obfuscate true resource usage, making it near impossible to accurately forecast costs. Because of this, bare metal cloud can help optimize ROI in adtech because these solutions are single tenanted, offering full visibility over your resource usage, and direct hardware-level control.

To keep your infrastructure costs controlled, consider these infrastructure best practices:

• Track unit economics, measuring cost per million bid requests or cost per campaign

• Separate steady and burst workloads, creating best-fit architectures for each

• Right-size regularly, auditing unused capacity and eliminating underutilized services

• Monitor data transfer costs especially for cross-region external data movement

• Align architectures to workload shape (real-time, batch, analytics workloads)

Remember, visibility into cost is the first step toward achieving predictable billing in adtech.

3. Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the volume of data moving in and out of your systems. In adtech, that data comes from your bid requests, creative delivery, user signals, log files, reporting feeds, and partner integrations. It means traffic rarely grows slowly and is more likely to spike suddenly.

This is because adtech platforms routinely process billions of requests per day. When dealing with large scale adtech data of this kind, even minor congestion can cause a ripple effect. This may appear as dropped bid requests, throttled connections, slower ad rendering, or missed revenue opportunities. Bandwidth constraints show up as performance issues, but the root cause is usually network saturation.

To avoid network saturation and protect performance, consider these infrastructure best practices:

• Plan for peak (not just average) traffic

• Keep frequently communicating services close to avoid unnecessary data movement

• Use caching for common lookups and creative assets

• Monitor throughput and saturation in real time

• Avoid cross-region chatter unless absolutely necessary

Try reframing data movement as a fundamental part of scaling as much as a basic compute requirement.

4. Storage

Adtech generates enormous volumes of data through processes like auction logs, impression events, user signals, optimization inputs, and reporting tables. And storing and accessing that data efficiently becomes increasingly complex as your traffic grows.

Without fast and reliable access to historical and real-time data and robust data redundancy, campaign optimization slows and compliance risks increase. As datasets expand, poorly designed storage systems become bottlenecks.

To prevent data access bottlenecks, consider these infrastructure best practices: 

• Separate real-time data stores from analytics stores

• Design for high IOPS and sustained throughput

• Partition and index based on real query patterns

• Continuously measure ingestion lag and query latency

• Ensure data is replicated and backed up with immutable storage for sensitive data

Your data architecture should never be an afterthought but treated as a core infrastructure priority. 

5. New technology

The adtech ecosystem is evolving rapidly. Driven by emerging technologies, new formats must consistently be implemented into workflows. Formats like CTV and retail media advertising, AI-driven optimization, and real-time contextual targeting (71% of customers now expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations).  

At the same, rapidly changing privacy regulations (e.g. requirements for GDPR compliant adtech infrastructure) are introducing new workload shapes and infrastructure requirements.

Infrastructure originally built for display and mobile requirements is likely to struggle when heavier CTV playouts or compute-intensive model training pipelines are introduced. When infrastructure is rigid, innovation slows (and in adtech, slow innovation means lost market share). The key is to ensure your infrastructure is designed with flexibility in mind.

To ensure architectural flexibility, consider these infrastructure best practices:  

• Build modular systems so you can add new services without rewriting the platform

• Separate experimental workloads from production workloads

• Design APIs to support multiple formats and channels

• Plan for different workload shapes (real-time, batch, compute-heavy)

• Prioritize flexibility alongside performance

Ultimately, if your infrastructure doesn’t accommodate change, it’s a liability. The key to future proof your adtech infrastructure is to design with architectural flexibility in mind from the start.  

Solve these five challenges early

In adtech, infrastructure defines whether you win or lose. If you’re building or revising your infrastructure, doing so with speed, cost, bandwidth, storage, and new technology in mind will help prevent future bottlenecks and revenue degradation.

If you’re already scaling your adtech infrastructure and have experienced some of these adtech infrastructure challenges, don’t worry. Start by identifying your top challenge, current bottleneck, and apply one beginner-level principle.

With incremental change you’ll start to reap the benefits.